I-Appliance BBS
The Official Source for Internet Appliance Upgrades and Mods
Amazon Honor System Click Here to Pay Learn More
BBS Main List | Sign In | Sign Up | Search | Help | Linux-Hacker.netReply to Thread | Printer |

Home / Other I-Appliances / Virgin Webplayer
FAT16 or FAT32?
formatting options for a hard drive in the Webplayer

New MessageFAT16 or FAT32? (modified 0 times) cjax42
Profile
Ok, I have a Fujitsu 6.4 gig laptop drive that I have been slaving over for the past several weeks trying to get it to say something other than "Invalid System Disk, Replace and Try Again" Finally, I decided I would go a little crazy and try the old 283 mg laptop hard drive I had in my closet. It booted perfectly without any problems. I tried different BIOS settings like other and DOS and found that they didn't affect the boot process at all. Upon further inspection I realized that the hard drive had been formatted FAT16 and my 6.4 gig was FAT32. So, I formatted the 6.4 as a FAT16 drive <consequently the largest I could get the partition to be was 2 gigs) It worked perfectly however when I went to install Windows, it reset the first time and all I get is a blank screen. I realize others on the list have had these same problems but I could find no answers.
MY QUESTIONS:
Does a hard drive have to be formatted FAT16 in order to work in the Webplayer?
How do I fix the blank screen, no boot error after the first reset in the Windows install.
Thanks
How many times have I told you? My name is The Plague!
06-26-2001 23:15:21

New MessageRE:FAT16 or FAT32? (modified 0 times) Pullet
Profile
I have the same Fujitsu drive, formatted as FAT32 running Win98. Did you mark the partition bootable (using FDISK)? That can be tricky since I couldn't get Win98's FDISK to mark it as bootable in my desktop machine when setting the drive up because it was drive D: in that machine. I had to make the Fujitsu drive C: in my desktop machine (by setting it to master and removing the IDE cable from the real drive C:), then boot from a floppy with FDISK on it so I could mark the partition bootable. Booted right up after installing it in the WebPlayer.

The blank screen is most likely caused by a bad boot block or bad DOS image... the BIOS loads it and jumps to it but the machine hangs 'cuz of bad code. If you can attach the drive to another Win9x machine you can do
FDISK drv: /MBR
which will re-install the master boot record *WITHOUT* affecting anything else on the drive. If that works and the drive is still FAT16 you can convert it to FAT32 later if you want.

06-29-2001 11:21:43

Reply to Thread | Printer |
All times are PSTPowered by UltraBoard v1.62



Copyright © 2000, Netmake Inc. All Rights Reserved.
See Terms and Conditions for more information.




i-opener opener laptop notebook computer help drivers dll free windows dos repair fix linux mac macintosh 2000 95 98 nt pc configure hardware software sound video netscape explorer network networking lan wan software cmos fat bios printer card mouse modem ide scsi cd rom controllers scanner tape hard drive cgi scripts source code mp3